Feds say group sought to ‘blanket’ area with crack and smack
Police had known for years that the corner of Longwood Avenue and Beck Street was a drug location and that drugs were sold on Longwood and Kelly and on Simpson Street. But it was only after a gun was fired on New Year’s Day last year that they made a federal case of it, and began to connect the dots.
As a result, on Feb. 28, prosecutors unsealed an indictment in federal court in Manhattan charging seven people as members of a drug trafficking ring and six of them with using guns in the course of peddling crack and heroin in a conspiracy they said had been going on since 2008.
The group “conspired to blanket a section of the Bronx with heroin and crack cocaine, using guns as their calling cards,” charged chief federal prosecutor, Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District, in a statement.
The feds entered the picture after NYPD officers arrested Adony Nina for firing a gun into the air on January 1, 2012.
Bharara said Nina was a leader of the drug-selling organization. He was arrested again by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives last April and has been in federal custody since then.
Police and federal agents arrested Candido Antomatti, aka Dido, Jorge Cruz, aka Roman, and Tiara Felix, aka TJ and Homie, on Feb. 27. They had already locked up Stephanie Mesa and Jason Morales, aka Menace, on state charges. The last defendant, Eduardo Rodriguez, remained at large.
In court, the authorities said that from 2008 to 2012, the group sold crack cocaine and heroin to street level drug customers and that they also wholesaled to other Bronx drug dealers, mostly in the vicinity of Longwood Avenue and Beck and Kelly Streets.
Members of the group also sold crack to a confidential informant near 941 Simpson Street and heroin to an undercover NYPD officer near 979 Leggett Avenue, according to the indictment.
“With today’s takedown in the Bronx, we are once again reminded of the connection between narcotics trafficking, guns and violence,” said Bharara.